Emmy Brown Berlind, Sephora | Modern Retail Vanguard 2024
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Sephora’s Beauty Insider loyalty program currently boasts more than 40 million members, up from 25 million in 2021. The beauty retailer has managed to boost its numbers by reimagining what a loyalty program can look like, from holding exclusive events to hosting masterclasses with top brands.
Emmy Brown Berlind, Sephora’s senior vice president and general manager of loyalty, is leading this charge. “To really make sure that we’re keeping our clients excited and loyal, we have to continue to evolve,” she says. “We have to keep the program fresh and exciting.”
For the past several years, Berlind and her team have tried to do just that. In 2023, Sephora gamified its rewards experience, giving members who completed challenges points they could redeem for products and perks. Earlier this year, Sephora held its first-ever Rouge Celebration Event: four days of in-store and online activations for the retailer’s top spenders. Sephora also grew its credit card-holder base by 20% in the last year and saw hundreds of thousands of users redeem “Beauty Insider Cash.” And, all the while, it’s continued to offer savings days, birthday gifts and free samples.
Berlind, who previously worked at Yes To and Clorox, joined Sephora in 2015. She first took over Sephora’s Beauty Insider program in 2021 as the company’s vice president and general manager of loyalty. She assumed her current role in 2023.
Berlind is proud of all of the ways she and her team have grown loyalty at Sephora, especially the Beauty Insider challenges. These include activities like “buy a makeup product” and “complete the skin routine quiz.” “Almost 20% of our active client base has participated in one of the challenges,” she says. “What we’ve been focusing on is, how do we use these challenges to have clients try something they haven’t done before?”
Going forward into 2025, Berlind is eager to roll out more challenges – for instance, she’s considering tweaking the duration of the challenges and the types of tasks – as well as provide additional benefits to Rouge members, who spend $1,000 or more in a calendar year. She says Sephora will continue to hold masterclasses and find other ways to connect customers with the brands they love.
“What we’re always trying to do is offer clients value and convenience, because that’s what we know that they want,” Berlind says. “That’s always going to be our North Star as we think [ahead] to the future.”